User:Seattle Skier

I'm a physicist from Seattle, Washington, USA. A longtime heavy user of Wikipedia, I had made a few occasional minor edits anonymously over the years. I finally decided to create an account in late 2006 so I could contribute in a more substantial manner. Thus far, I've been contributing mostly to various articles about alpine skiing, volcanoes, and glaciers, my three greatest passions. I may contribute more to articles about physics and geophysics eventually, but for now it's more fun to write about those other subjects.

In March 2007, I founded WikiProject Volcanoes which now includes over 2,000 articles within its scope, and it has since become the focus of the majority of my Wikipedia efforts. I've taught myself a rudimentary reading knowledge of Russian and Spanish over the past few years, mostly in order to read volcanological books and papers written in those languages, which are generally not available in English translation. Hence the "ru–0" and "es–0" userboxes at right. Hopefully, I'll eventually learn both languages well enough to hold a conversation.

In May 2007, I became an administrator following a successful request for adminship. As a precaution to avoid compromising the security of this account, I have created an alternate account, User:Seattle Skier2, to be used for logging in from nonsecure locations such as public computers and WiFi networks. For my committed identity, see /Identity.

Wikipedia articles created
See /Articles Created for a chronological list.

Image uploads
One of the biggest deficiencies throughout Wikipedia is a complete lack of photos in many, many articles. A good article, especially about mountains or glaciers, requires a photo and preferably several good photos. I am trying to contribute as many images as possible to remedy this deficiency, from both public domain sources (USGS, NPS, etc.) and my own collection. I plan to eventually contribute 100s if not 1000s of photos, so I'm just getting started with this. I now have an account on Wikimedia Commons and plan to upload all free images there from now on. This will allow them to be easily used in Wikipedia articles in any language. I have also moved all previously uploaded free images to the Commons.

Countries visited
I'm not as well-travelled as I would like to be, but I have had the good fortune to visit a number of countries on three continents, and thus gain a broader perspective on our diverse globe.